Saturday 31 October 2015

Halloween 2015


The children get so excited about Halloween so this year I thought of a few activities that hey could engage in. Play dough is always a great hit so we first made some monsters from the play dough. The children used their fine motor skills to design and create their monsters and enjoyed telling the other children about their monster!



Sensory trays are fabulous learning resources with children of all ages and one child has been asking me for waterbeds for a long time so this was a great opportunity. We used the black beads with some cups and cutlery that enabled imaginative conversations from the older children and use of fine motor skills from our one year old who enjoyed moving the beads from pot to pot and feeling them with her hands. 

The older children enjoyed some artistic drawing, both designing the face on their pumpkins and creating a halloween themed silhouettes on coffee filters that they then painted with watercolour paints to give a sunset background. The younger children made their silhouettes from using coloured tissue paper and the combination of these gave us a great halloween display!

Thursday 1 October 2015

Natural Playgrounds


One of the great joys of being a childminder is having the freedom to take the children out into the natural environment where they can learn so much through play and exploration. This morning was another beautiful Autumn morning so we decided to do a walk though some local woods to the river. Although only a simple walk I watched the children and was fascinated by the many areas of learning covered within this lovely Autumn stroll. Just some of these are listed below:



Personal, Social and Emotional Development: Through interacting with their peers and discussing their thoughts and ideas the children learn how to interact with others and develop appropriate social behaviours. 

Physical Development: From climbing on trees, wading through long grass and squelching through mud through to picking up sticks to float down the river and throwing stones the children develop both fine and gross motor skills and benefit from the fresh air and exercise. 

Communication & Language: The children talk about what they can see as well as discussing their ideas with one another. 


Literacy: We related the different surfaces that we encountered to those detailed in the 'going on a bear hunt' book. 

Numeracy: The children instinctively counted a range of objects from sticks and stones through to the steps they were taking. 

Understanding the World: We looked at the environment around us, discussing the autumn, inspecting the effect of the low sun on our shadows and watching the river carry the sticks downstream.